Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 28, 1999

There is a very good movie stuck somewhere on "The Thirteenth Floor" trying to get out.

Too bad this isn't it.

Somewhere in this murder mystery disguised as science fiction is a terrific story. A computer programmer who has helped create a virtual-reality simulation of Los Angeles in the 1930s travels back in time to find the killer, who may be himself.

"The Thirteenth Floor," which stars Armin Mueller-Stahl ("Shine") and Craig Bierko, needs livelier performances and most of all a sense of humor, but it nonetheless rewards the patience of those willing to stick with it.

"The Thirteenth Floor" finally builds up a head of steam as the layers of the story accumulate and percolate. It bears a family resemblance to the Wachowski brothers' "The Matrix" and David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ," the other current films that play off the substitution of virtual reality for the real world.

"The Thirteenth Floor" is not the special-effects tour de force that "The Matrix" is, but it's no slouch, either. The re- creation of Los Angeles, in 1937 and much, much later, provide some of the film's best moments. The year the Hindenburg crashed was the era when Los Angeles had streetcars, there were oil derricks on the outskirts of town and the first highrises were going up along Wilshire Boulevard.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

The first look we get of life in Los Angeles in the '30s makes it naughty but very elegant, in contrast to the coarse, vulgar and overbearing tone of the present. It comes as no surprise when we learn that one of the characters is traveling back in time specifically for sex.

There's a reason they called them the good old days.

There's also a reason hotels do not have a 13th floor -- it is considered unlucky. No one, apparently, told computer wizards Hannon Fuller and Douglas Hall, visionaries who have developed their amazing silicon-chip simulation of another world on the top-secret 13th floor.

Fuller (Mueller-Stahl) had begun to think of the simulation "as his own personal playground," which will strike home with anyone who has become addicted to the Internet. He is found stabbed to death, however, and Hall (Bierko) wakes up to discover his own bloody shirt and no recollection of how it got that way.

He goes into the simulation, which is done by slipping under a bed of green lasers, to do some sleuthing.

There is a lot Hall did not know about Fuller, a man he had worked with intimately for years. Fuller's previously unknown daughter, Jane (Gretchen Mol), shows up from Paris, claiming that her father planned to shut down the company.

He also did not know that Fuller was sneaking into the alternate universe in order to find girls -- "these are the units he was interacting with," he is told.

While the movie takes Descartes' motto "I think, therefore I am" as its philosophical underpinning, there is a strong dose of puritanism at work, too. Characters who just want to have some fun and plug into an alternate reality are severely punished.

Most of the characters have counterparts in the past. They are "units" of virtual reality, program links to the other world for the present-day characters. Each actor plays at least two roles.

Vincent D'Onofrio is blond in both worlds: He is a long-haired, unshaven geek in the present, a neatly groomed bartender in the past, who begins to suspect that things are not what they seem. "I watched you and Fuller do the old switcheroo," he tells Hall.

ALTERNATE REALITIES

There may not be just two realities but many of them. There are questions that leave the viewer always slightly off- balance, such as "Where did this mild- mannered computer programmer learn to fight dirty?"

It turns out, too, that there are limits to the simulation. It has an "edge," and people go to it. "He tried to kill me," one character says. "He found out his world wasn't real." People who do not live in the real world, after all, have nothing to lose.

Not only do characters have different identities in the two realities, but they sometimes have different identities in the present. Something goes haywire, and the simulated characters start showing up in the present. "I'm just like you, just a bunch of electricity." People's identities start changing. "When did you download into him?"

This is fascinating stuff and would be more so if the actors brought more energy to it.

Bierko has not had good luck with his choice of films (Geena Davis' "The Long Kiss Goodnight," Larry David's "Sour Grapes" and Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"), all of which have the phrase "ill-fated" attached to them. Bierko might as well be a simulacrum of Vince Vaughn ("Psycho"), whom he resembles and who, with his streak of craziness, might have been very good in this role.

The film was produced by Roland Emmerich but lacks the wit that he and Dean Devlin brought to "Independence Day." This film could have used some of that spark or at least something like it.

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